Preparatory sketches for “Rodent Mount” by McQuarrie.
Preparatory sketches for “Rodent Mount” by McQuarrie.
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STAR WARS SEQUEL, SCREENPLAY BY LEIGH BRACKETT, FROM THE ADVENTURES OF LUKE SKYWALKER BY GEORGE LUCAS, FEBRUARY 17, 1978—FIRST-DRAFT SUMMARY
Brackett’s 128-page script starts on the Ice Planet, where Luke is admiring “a real pretty ice formation on the other side of the ridge”—when he is attacked by a snow monster. Back at the base, Solo grows restless, remarking, “I doubt if even God remembers where he hung this star.” In the War Room, the Rebels consult a “three-dimensional model occupying a huge tank in the center of a great ice chamber.”
WILLARD
Since we destroyed the Empire’s Death Star, many more systems have found courage to join the rebellion. At the last count, one thousand and twenty-six. But as you see, we’re widely scattered and still vastly inferior in ships and men.
After the meeting, Leia gives Han a mission, explaining that, “We’ve been in touch with your stepfather … Ovan Marekal is the most powerful man in the galaxy next to the Emperor … through his Transport Guild.” Han’s job is to convince him to join the Rebellion. Meanwhile, “unnoticed, dim white shapes move and watch.”
Minch-Yoda concepts by Johnston (nos. 152 and 157), February 1978.
Minch-Yoda concepts by Johnston (nos. 189 and 206), February 1978.
Minch-Yoda concept by Johnston (no. 263), February 1978.
Luke is lying on the floor of an ice cave when he hears Ben’s voice: “Remember the Force, boy. Open your mind to it, open your heart.” When the snow monster tries to block the way, Luke slashes at him with his lightsaber and the creature melts back into the ice formations (where more seem to live). Back at the base, C-3PO discovers something hidden in Luke’s lightsaber: “As he grips the hilt awkwardly, there is a sharp click and something crystalline and shiny pops out of a hidden recess in the hilt.”
On the city-planet of Ton Muund, Darth Vader searches for the Rebels. When an alien, with the aid of an interpreter, tells Vader of unusual ship activity in the Granida Cluster, he exclaims, “The coordinates, man! The coordinates!” Vader flies off to check on the story. On the ice planet, the crystal reveals the coordinates of a star system in a remote part of the galaxy. When the Empire’s fleet closes on the ice planet, Vader talks of his recent history:
DARTH VADER
[Luke Skywalker] disabled my fighter and sent me spinning off into space with all systems dead, even the radio … but I knew. I knew when he destroyed the Death Star, using the Force to find the target. I had much time to consider Master Skywalker while I was waiting to be rescued. He’s too much like his father …
Even before the Empire attacks, the snow monsters start killing Rebels, and only the Wookiee takes them on: “Chewie looks child-sized by comparison with his adversary. He is also becoming covered with frost where the snow-creature touches him. A human would have been dead by now.” Luke, on the other hand, is humiliated when he cannot fend off the monsters using the Force. Han remarks, “You’re not a Jedi Knight, and you never will be.”
The snow monsters force the Rebels to evacuate, and they damage the Millennium Falcon. When the Rebels emerge from their base, they find the Empire waiting for them: “On the snow plain in front of the ice-castle, Imperial ships land. The transports disgorge great tank-type crawlers and armored troopers …” In the chaos, overhead pipes break and many Rebels are frozen—including C-3PO, who is encased in ice (he later thaws out). The Rebels are defeated, but Luke escapes in Leia’s ship when he is separated from the others by the battle. Vader complains to a foot soldier, “He lives. Leave me, you incompetent idiot.”
But in his “spacer,” Luke is attacked telepathically by Vader: “What’s the matter? I can’t breathe …” Only because R2-D2 takes over and makes the ship jump into hyperspace is Luke saved. “Goodbye, Luke Skywalker,” Vader says, believing he has killed Luke. The Falcon also jumps to hyperspace to escape Imperial pursuers. R2 crash-lands their ship on the bog planet, where Luke meets Minch.
MINCH
Skywalker. Skywalker. And why do you come to walk my sky, with the sword of a Jedi Knight? … I remember another Skywalker.
Minch hops away. Later, Luke learns that Obi-Wan trained with Minch on the same planet. In order to communicate with Ben, Minch summons him—“By the Force, I call you!”
Suddenly Ben is there … with a saber in his hand … They begin a fencing match which develops into a thing of breathtaking skill and beauty … and Minch is clearly the superior.
Minch’s house is “splotlessly clean.” Vader’s castle, on the other hand, is “black iron that squats on a rock in the midst of a crimson sea.” When Luke stretches out with the Force, Vader realizes that Luke is still alive; likewise, Minch can feel Vader.
MINCH
The dark side of the Force! Luke, you’re in greater danger than I realized. Even untrained, you’re far more powerful than I.
Afterward Vader flips a switch and a screen comes to life: “The man revealed is draped and hooded in cloth-of-gold”—the Emperor.
EMPEROR
Skywalker is more dangerous than even I had realized. Remove him this time or I shall remove you.
Meanwhile Han, Leia, and company decide to seek refuge with Lando Kadar, on a world called Hoth—“I think the name means ‘cloud,’ ” Han remarks. After arriving, Solo tries to disguise the identity of Leia, calling her “Ethania Eredith.” Lando introduces them to his “old friend, Bahiri, chief of the White Bird clan of the Cloud People.”
Back on the bog planet, Luke is now able to summon Ben, and the latter appears accompanied by Luke’s father, who reveals to Luke that he has a sister.
Snowspeeder concept by McQuarrie (no. 158).
Snowspeeder concept by McQuarrie (unnumbered).
Snowspeeder concept by McQuarrie (no. 184), February 1978.
Snowspeeder concept by Johnston (no. 173), circa February 1978 (the Rebels would now use flying craft to bring down the walkers, instead of tanks).
Snow speeder concept sketch by Johnston (no. 174), February 1978.
Snow speeder concept sketch by McQuarrie (no. 157).
Snow speeder concept sketch by McQuarrie (no. 159).
Snow speeder concept sketch by McQuarrie (no. 184.6), February 1978.
Color study of “Armored landspeeders bring down walker” by McQuarrie, February 20–22, 1978.
The final painting of “Armored landspeeders bring down walker” by McQuarrie, February 20–22, 1978: “I worked on a lot of the equipment used on Hoth, both by the Rebels and the Empire,” he says. “The armored speeders are low-level fighters, comparable to the vehicles called ‘tank busters’ during World War II.”
Preparatory sketches by McQuarrie for snow battle painting.
SKYWALKER
I sent you both away for your own safety, far apart from each other.
LUKE
Where is she? What’s her name?
SKYWALKER
If I were to tell you, Darth Vader could get that information from your mind and use her as a hostage … Luke, will you take from me the oath of a Jedi Knight?
Ben, Minch, Luke, and his father cross sabers and Luke swears to “dedicate my life to the cause of freedom and justice” (next to this passage, Lucas wrote, “No”). Not long afterward, Minch instructs Luke to open his mind to the dark side. Luke and Vader communicate with their minds, and the dark adept tries to tempt Luke (a “No” is also written next to the dialogue below).
VADER
You’re in love with Leia. You don’t want to lose her to Han Solo … but you will, if you lack the courage to use the strength that’s in you. A strength as great as mine, Luke. If you join with me, nothing can stand against us … The Empire is a passing phase. We would rule instead. You and I. The Emperor is a harsh master. You would not be.
On Hoth, Lando reveals a secret:
LANDO
/> I’m a clone. Of the Ashardi family. My greatgrandfather wanted many sons and he produced them from the cells of his own body. His sister, a remarkable woman, produced many daughters by the same means. Thus we keep the blood pure. But since the wars, there are not many of us left and we try not to attract attention.
When Vader reveals his presence on Hoth, he doesn’t imprison Han, Leia, and the others; he simply lets them go about their business, though they’re not allowed to leave the orbital city. Luke decides to face Vader, to confront his fears, and travels to Hoth, where he arrives with Bahiri, whom he’s befriended. Stormtroopers kill the leader of the alien Cloud People, which makes Lando change sides. Luke then protects his friends. “Suddenly the saber is out and blazing,” and Han is impressed. Next, Luke battles Vader, even using the dark side of the Force to get the upper hand, though Vader is more powerful in the end.
VADER
But you’ve had no training in the dark side. You simply felt more power in it, and you used it for revenge, for hate, for the sake of being able to say that you, Luke Skywalker, had destroyed the great Darth Vader … So, once more, little Jedi. Will you join me?
LUKE
I’ve wasted and thrown away all the careful teaching I was given. I betrayed my trust. I broke my oath. I would prefer to die.
VADER
You’re a fool, Luke. Nevertheless, it can be arranged.
Luke jumps down a vent shaft. As the Falcon blasts her way out with the others aboard, Luke manages to jump on the ship as she passes below. The group takes refuge on a jewel-like planet, Besspin Kaalida. Han then leaves with Chewbacca to persuade his stepfather to join the Alliance, as Leia (who is now in love with Han), Luke, Lando, and the droids watch him go.
Abruptly Luke unsheathes the lightsaber and activates [it], holding it in a position of salute for the departing Falcon.
Early Cloud City native concept, perhaps for the alien leader, Bahiri, by Johnston (no. 97), January 1978.
Early Cloud City native concept by Johnston (no. 86), January 1978.
Early Cloud City native concept by Johnston (no. 92), January 1978.
Early Cloud City native concept by Johnston (no. 99), January 1978.
Early Cloud City native concept by McQuarrie (no. 70), early 1978.
Early Cloud City native concept by McQuarrie (no. 69), early 1978.
Early Cloud City native concept by McQuarrie (no. 112), early 1978.
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DRAFTED
With Brackett hospitalized, everyone waiting to get started, a locked-in production scheduled, and no other writer on hand, Lucas was left with no choice but to write the second draft himself. “George doesn’t like to write,” Kershner says. “He hates writing.”
The same, of course, had been true for each of Lucas’s films so far, but he’d had to write every script, except Raiders. “I had no script and I didn’t have anyone to write the damn thing,” Lucas says. “No matter how much I wanted to get out of writing, I was forced to sit down and work on it.”
“George would come in and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to have this giant snow battle, start doing some storyboards,’ ” says Johnston. “But there was no script! But George would say, ‘Don’t worry about that, just do the storyboards.’ The process then was to lay out random shots and pick out some that would conceivably work. George would work on the script at home while I would be working on the boards. During meetings, he would pick out shots that he felt looked promising and write them in. It was a very unusual evolution.”
“Pink Panther was to have been completed by January, but it went over,” Brian Johnson says. “So I arrived at ILM on March 13. I talked with Lucas and Kurtz and began setting up the effects for Empire. At the same time, Twentieth Century–Fox asked me if I would be interested in Alien [1979]. When I told them I was already engaged on Empire, they said, ‘We think you can combine the two.’ Well, I didn’t really think so, since it is very difficult to work on two pictures at the same time, but they said they would talk to George and Gary to see if they could come to some sort of agreement. As it happened, Empire was being revised—George was still working on the script and the storyboards hadn’t been completed—so Fox and Lucasfilm agreed that I could pretty much devote all of my time to Alien.”
It was now apparent that the biggest special effects question was going to be how to realize the new, very, very small Jedi Master. “When the first draft of the screenplay was out and we had this little two-foot-tall man, we had to decide a way to do it,” says Kurtz. “One was to use the technique used in Darby O’Gill and the Little People [1959], the Disney movie, where the leprechauns are portrayed by full-sized people or midgets. They had shot them using forced perspective and very high light levels. It looks like they’re small, but they’re just much farther away from the camera; it’s cheated. But you have to build the sets and the props to fit that, which is very complicated, so we rejected that idea as being too restrictive.”
A USC newspaper photo capturing several alumni in February 1978 was titled, “The Inspiration”—because actor Clarence (Buster) Crabbe (standing on the left), the original Flash Gordon, is meeting with Lucas (on right; Randy Kleiser stands between them, with Howard Kazanjian in the background).
Sadly, five days after Johnson visited ILM, Leigh Brackett died at Lancaster Community Hospital, on Saturday, March 18, at the age of 60. A press release went out on March 22, saying that the cause of death was “a long bout with cancer.” Her ashes were sent to Kinsman, Ohio, to be buried next to her husband, Edmond Hamilton, who had also been a noted science-fiction writer. (A contract would be drawn up on August 25, 1978, between Lucasfilm and the Estate of Leigh Brackett to confirm her contribution and remuneration beyond the original agreement.)
Continuing to work in his San Anselmo home, Lucas very quickly hammered out a second draft, finishing on April 1, 1978 (incredibly fast when that six weeks is compared with the three years he’d spent writing his first Star Wars scripts). “I found it much easier than I’d expected, almost enjoyable,” he says. “It was easier because it’s really part of the Star Wars story. I wrote it from my point of view, like I was going into that world. The risk I took was putting the action and adventure up front and then switching to a more personal film where people were going to be philosophical and worrying about emotional issues.”
In his script, the final film has taken a definitive form and the scenes are numbered, denoting Lucas’s nearness to a shooting script. Because of the two-part nature of the plot, with the following film scheduled to wrap up the story lines begun in the first sequel, the draft structure does move from a big epic battle to smaller personal duels, which would enable the next film, in turn, to evolve from personal stories to a climactic battle (see the sidebar on this page).
“I wanted to do something that was a little bit more grown-up in terms of the entertainment value, which meant more realistic and more of a fear factor,” says Lucas. “But the genre has a range that you’re allowed to work in. I try to work in that range while pushing the parameters a little bit to see what I can actually get away with. Still, I was very adamant that it be one movie, that both films have the same sensibility.”
Lucas also carefully balanced the film’s structure in terms of the main characters’ emotional development. In the treatment, Ben had told Luke it was time to leave Yoda; now Luke must choose between an instinctive emotional attachment and the completion of his training. “Luke’s decision to rescue his friends is the right one, but his methodology is wrong,” Lucas says. Luke’s massacre of the stormtroopers, on the other hand, was cut. “I was homing in on how angry he gets and how much do I make him look like he’s turning to the dark side. I decided to move him closer to the dark side in the next film, not in this one.
Cloud City native concepts by McQuarrie (nos. 73 and 114), December 1977 and January 1978.
“On the other side, you have Lando who is selling out his friends to save his city, and then you have Han and Lei
a caught in the middle of the whole mess,” Lucas adds. “Lando’s decision to save his people and himself is a little like Han’s development in Star Wars but also like Luke’s, where fate steps in: He can’t avoid the situation. In this one, all the stories for all the characters are completely interwoven, unlike in Graffiti where they only intersect, so Empire was a much more elaborate puzzle to piece together.”
Apart from establishing the framework and major dialogue, Lucas either added or revived key elements: Han’s debt to Jabba the Hutt, which had figured at the end of the treatment but was left out of the first draft, was reinstated; related to that plotline, Lucas also introduced several mercenaries. “There were quite a few films made about bounty hunters in the Old West,” he explains. “That’s where that came from.”
The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Enhanced Edition) Page 10